Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Pacific Tsunami Warning Center Field Trip

On Wednesday, May 19th, we were able to visit the newly operational PTWC (http://ptwc.weather.gov/) down at the Inouye Regional Center on Ford Island. It was a wonderful opportunity for the students to see real-world applications of topics they covered briefly in class (plate tectonics, seismic waves, earthquakes).


We spent the first hour getting an in-depth lecture on how tsunamis work and how they are detected. The students then rotated through three stations: Science on a Sphere (http://sos.noaa.gov/What_is_SOS/index.html) showed the world through various data maps, International Tsunami Information Center (http://itic.ioc-unesco.org/index.php) visualized tsunamis with the wave tank, and the Control Center saw how Earthquakes and Tsunamis were measured and tracked in real-time. Many thanks to my uncle, Dr. Vindell Hsu for making this trip possible.

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